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ELEPHANTS UNDER HUMAN CARE
 ELEPHANTS
UNDER
HUMAN CARE
The Behaviour, Ecology, and Welfare of
Elephants in Captivity

PAUL A. REES
School of Science, Engineering and Environment, University of Salford, United Kingdom
Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier
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Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India

 Contents

Acknowledgements xiii 2. Ethological data collection and

Preface xv elephant activity budgets
Who is this book for? xvii
2.1 Introduction 29
‘Zoo elephant’ or ‘elephant living in a 2.2 Methodology 29
zoo’: a note on terminology xix 2.2.1 Identifying individuals 29
2.2.2 Studying elephants in zoos 31
1. Elephants and their relationship with 2.2.3 Ethograms 34
humans 2.2.4 Methodological difficulties 36
2.2.5 Data collection by caregivers 38
1.1 Another book about elephants 1 2.3 Activity budgets 39
1.2 What is an elephant? 3 2.3.1 Introduction 39
1.2.1 Elephant taxonomy 3 2.3.2 Feeding 43
1.3 Conservation status 7 2.3.3 Dusting 45
1.3.1 The status of Asian elephants in the 2.3.4 Walking 46
wild 7 2.3.5 Resting, sleeping and nocturnal
1.3.2 The status of African elephants in the behaviour 46
wild 7 2.4 The 24-hour needs of elephants in zoos 50
1.4 The human use of elephants 8
1.4.1 Elephants in ancient times 8 3. Elephant social structure, behaviour
1.4.2 Have elephants been
and complexity
domesticated? 9
1.4.3 Ceremonial and religious use of 3.1 Introduction 51
elephants; elephants as gifts 9 3.2 The structure of elephant societies 51
1.4.4 The use of elephants for transportation 3.2.1 Elephant societies in the wild 51
and as weapons of war 10 3.2.2 Elephant societies in captivity 53
1.4.5 Elephants and forestry operations 13 3.2.3 Social behaviour and breeding 59
1.4.6 Elephants as entertainers: circuses, sports 3.3 Associations between individuals and
and tourism 13 friendships 59
1.4.7 Elephants as ambassadors for 3.4 Introductions into an elephant group 63
conservation 14 3.5 Protective formations 64
1.5 The beginning of elephant research 15 3.6 Dominance hierarchies 66
1.5.1 Aristotle and elephants 15 3.7 Aggression, appeasement and chastisement 68
1.5.2 Anatomical research 18 3.8 Personality 76
1.5.3 Anecdotes as a source of knowledge
about elephants 24 4. Elephant reproductive biology
1.5.4 Papers in academic journals 25
1.5.5 Early physiological research 25 4.1 Introduction 81
1.6 Unacceptable elephant science 26 4.2 Historical accounts of sexual behaviour 81
1.7 Captive elephants as proxies for wild 4.3 Courtship and mating behaviour 83
elephants 27 4.4 Chemical control of reproduction 88

ix
x Contents

4.4.1 Musth 88 6.2.2 Acclimatisation to new

4.4.2 Endocrine monitoring of females 89 environments 130
4.5 Behavioural indicators of oestrus 90 6.2.3 Thermoregulation 130
4.6 Gestation, pregnancy management and 6.3 Feeding ecology and energetics 133
birth 91 6.3.1 Food preferences 133
4.7 Parenting and calf development 93 6.3.2 Feeding methods 134
4.7.1 Developmental milestones and birth 6.3.3 Calculating food consumption 134
statistics 93 6.3.4 Digestibility 137
4.7.2 Parenting and allomothering 94 6.3.5 Food passage time 137
4.7.3 The effect of a calf on social 6.3.6 Defaecation 139
interactions in the herd 99 6.3.7 Food supplementation 139
4.8 Early sexual behaviour 100 6.4 Energetics 140
4.8.1 Early male sexual behaviour 100 6.5 Exhibit design and enclosure use 141
4.8.2 Juvenile mounting 100 6.5.1 Introduction 141
4.9 Reproductive challenges and solutions 106 6.5.2 Enclosure use 142
4.9.1 Acyclicity and sperm quality 106 6.5.3 Substrate and indoor versus outdoor
4.9.2 Obstetrics and birthing problems 109 preferences 146
4.9.3 New techniques in reproductive 6.5.4 Multispecies exhibits 148
physiology 109 6.5.5 Rotational exhibits 149
6.5.6 Elephants as agents of landscape change
5. Elephant cognition, communication in zoos 150
and tool use 6.6 Population ecology 153
6.6.1 Introduction 153
5.1 Introduction 113 6.6.2 Age determination from teeth 154
5.2 Cognition 113 6.6.3 Longevity and life expectancy in
5.2.1 Historical perspectives 113 zoos 154
5.2.2 Self-awareness: do elephants know 6.6.4 Birth rates and calf survival 155
they exist? 114 6.6.5 Sexual maturity and mean calving
5.2.3 Discrimination between objects and interval 157
between quantities 116 6.6.6 Reproductive performance of Asian
5.2.4 Insightful behaviour 116 camp elephants 158
5.2.5 Pointing 116 6.6.7 Reproductive cessation and the
5.2.6 Memory 117 ‘mother hypothesis’ 161
5.3 Communication 118 6.6.8 Sustainability of zoo populations 161
5.3.1 Introduction 118 6.6.9 Importation of elephants from range
5.3.2 Vocal communication 119 states 162
5.3.3 Human speech imitation 120 6.7 Genetics 163
5.3.4 Chemical communication 120 6.7.1 Introduction 163
5.3.5 Tactile and seismic 6.7.2 Interspecific hybridisation 164
communication 123 6.7.3 Intraspecific hybridisation 164
5.4 Visual acuity and visual discrimination 123 6.7.4 Genetic diversity 164
5.5 Tool use 124
5.6 Knowing when to cooperate 127 7. Elephant welfare

6. Elephant ecology and genetics 7.1 Historical perspectives 169

7.2 Measuring elephant welfare 173
6.1 Introduction 129 7.2.1 What is welfare? 173
6.2 Ecophysiology 129 7.2.2 How can welfare be measured? 173
6.2.1 Introduction 129 7.2.3 Population-level welfare indices 175
 Contents
7.2.4 Body weight and condition scoring 176
7.2.5 The welfare of elephants working in
tourism 179
7.2.6 Stress and distress 180
7.2.7 Behaviour as a welfare indicator 181
7.2.8 Stereotypic behaviours 183
7.3 Environmental enrichment 194
7.3.1 Defining environmental
enrichment 194
7.3.2 Food and foraging as enrichment 196
7.3.3 Substratum and trees as
enrichment 199
7.3.4 Water as enrichment 202
7.3.5 Sleep, rest and enrichment 202
7.3.6 Sound, music and art as
enrichment 205
7.3.7 Interactive toys 206
7.3.8 Improving elephant welfare through
breeding 206
7.3.9 Social contact: the ultimate in
enrichment 207
7.4 Training 207
7.5 Locomotion and gait 208
7.6 Obesity 210
7.7 Disease 211
7.7.1 Introduction 211
7.7.2 Histology 213
7.7.3 Foot health 214
7.7.4 Tuberculosis 216
7.7.5 Elephant endotheliotropic
herpesviruses 217
8. Housing and handling elephants
8.1 Introduction 219
8.2 Wild elephant decline and the establishment
of ex situ breeding programmes 219
8.3 Elephant enclosures 222
8.3.1 Housing and containment 222
8.3.2 Early elephant houses 223
8.3.3 Enclosure size and substratum 229
8.3.4 New enclosures 237
8.4 The cost of keeping elephants under good
welfare conditions 238
8.5 Elephants and their caretakers 243
8.5.1 Keeper elephant bonds 243
8.5.2 Traditional elephant expertise versus zoo
husbandry 244
8.5.3 Keeper and mahout deaths 246
xi
8.5.4 Free versus protected contact 248
8.6 Transportation 250
9. Ethics, pressure groups and the law
9.1 Introduction 259
9.2 Is it ethical to keep elephants in
captivity? 259
9.3 Pressure groups 264
9.4 Law 266
9.4.1 Introduction 266
9.4.2 Ivory in human ownership 266
9.4.3 The UN Convention on Biological
Diversity and the IUCN 268
9.4.4 Elephants, zoos and the law 270
9.4.5 The law and elephants in private
ownership 271
9.4.6 Elephants, entertainment and the
law 272
9.4.7 Legal personhood and habeas
corpus 274
9.4.8 Elephant cruelty and cruel
methods 275
9.4.9 Zoos and the wildlife trade 278
9.4.10 A right to companionship and
retirement 282
9.4.11 Financial support for in situ
conservation 284
10. The conservation value of captive
elephants
10.1 Introduction 287
10.2 The popularity of elephants in zoos 290
10.3 Zoo elephants as insurance populations 294
10.3.1 Introduction 294
10.3.2 The Species Survival Plan in North
America 295
10.3.3 The European Endangered species
Programme 295
10.3.4 Are zoo elephant populations
sustainable? 296
10.4 Scientific research 297
10.5 The development of technologies relevant to
field conservation 298
10.6 Educational function 300
10.7 Professional training of local conservationists
and associated technology transfer 306
10.8 Fundraising for in situ conservation 307
xii Contents

10.9 Do zoo and conservation authorities support 11.8 Cloning 320

captive breeding in zoos? 308 11.9 Elephants as therapy 320
10.10 Captive breeding in range states 309 11.10 Climate change 321
10.11 ‘Domestication’ of African elephants 310 11.11 A role for zoos? 321
10.12 Conclusion 310 11.12 Consumptive use or intensive protection
zones? 324
11. The future of elephants in captivity 11.13 The court of public opinion 326
11.14 Predictions 326
11.1 Introduction 313 Postscript 327
11.2 Elephant ranching 313
11.3 Rewilding shades of Jurassic Park 315 Appendix 329
11.4 Release to the wild 316
11.5 Welfare concerns 317
Glossary 333
11.6 Sanctuaries 317 References 341
11.7 A repository of useful genes 318 Index 379
For Katy, Clara and Elliot
my Little Toomai
But it was all for the sake of Little Toomai, who had seen what never man had seen before
the dance of the elephants at night and alone in the heart of the Garo hills!

Toomai of the Elephants,

The Jungle Book,
Rudyard Kipling (1894)
 Acknowledgements

A number of individuals and organisations have assisted in the production of this

book. At Elsevier I would like to thank Anna Valutkevich (Acquisitions Editor) for believ-
ing that the world needs another book about elephants, as well as all the people who were
involved in its production, especially Billie Jean Fernandez.
I am indebted to Dr Alan Woodward, who kindly drew Figs 3.17, 3.19B, 4.1 and 6.5.
Thanks are also due to a number of my colleagues at the University of Salford. Prof.
Alaric Searle kindly provided me with a copy of his paper comparing the roles of war ele-
phants and tanks, and some of the information contained therein has been used in
Table 1.1. Dr Simon Hutchinson kindly allowed me to use Fig. 1.16A and also provided
me with information about a number of events of which I would not otherwise have been
aware. My colleague Dr Robert Jehle kindly translated the text in Fig. 1.2 from German
into English. The text in Figs 1.1 and 1.2 was made available by the Biodiversity Heritage
Library (www.biodiversitylibrary.org).
I have reproduced a number of images of historical interest from the US Library of
Congress (Figs 1.4, 1.6 1.8, 1.13, 1.14, 7.25, 8.6 8.8), the New York Public Library (Fig. 8.3)
and the University of Queensland (Fig. 8.1). These organisations have indicated that there
is no known restriction on the publication of these images.
My friend the late Ivor Rosaire kindly supplied me with data on the food eaten by the
elephants kept at Knowsley Safari Park, United Kingdom (Fig. 6.4) when I worked there
as an elephant keeper in 1976 77. The staff of the Elephant House at Chester Zoo and the
zoo management allowed me to study their elephants and I am most grateful to have had
this opportunity. I am particularly grateful to Mick Jones and Alan Littlehales for sharing
their vast knowledge of elephants with me. Louise Bell, formerly a research officer at
Blackpool Zoo, generously provided Fig. 4.14 that was previously published in Rees
(2011). I am most grateful to her for this and to Kevin Williams, of Reaseheath College, for
kindly providing me with data on zoo elephant populations held in ZIMS. In India, Prof.
Madhyastha, formerly of the University of Mangalore, kindly arranged for me to visit ele-
phant camps in Kushnalagar and the elephant at Kateel Shri Durgaparameshwari Temple
in Karnataka State during a visit funded by the British Council.
A number of the figures and tables used in this book have previously been published
elsewhere in my own papers and books, and the papers of others. I am grateful to Elsevier
for permission to use Figs 2.1B, 5.3, 5.4, 5.6, 6.2, 7.9, 7.10 and 11.2, and to Wiley-Blackwell
for permission to reproduce Figs 1.15, 2.1A, 2.4 2.6, 2.8, 3.1 3.3, 3.10, 4.1, 4.5, 4.8, 4.12,
4.14, 4.15, 5.8, 6.3, 7.4, 7.11, 8.2C, 8.5B, 8.18 and 8.20, and Table 2.2. Figs 3.19 and 3.20 were
first published by the Bombay Natural History Society, and Fig. 6.8 is based on a
figure first published by the Association of British and Irish Wild Animal Keepers (in
Ratel). Fig. 3.6 was first published in International Zoo News and Table 6.2 by the Zoological

xiii
xiv Acknowledgements

Society of London (in the Journal of Zoology). The images used in Figs 3.7 and 4.13 and
Tables 4.6 4.9 were originally published by Taylor & Francis.
Fig. 1.16B was made available by Chetham’s Library, Manchester, United Kingdom,
from its archive of materials from the former Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester. Stephen Fritz
(Stephen Fritz Enterprises, Inc.) generously provided me with information about, and
photographs of, his elephant transportation operations, and I am most grateful for this
(Figs 8.24 8.26). Sections of UK legislation and excerpts from the Secretary of State’s
Standards of Modern Zoo Practice are reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
My brother Les Rees very kindly supplied Figs 8.12 and 8.14. My daughter Clara Clark
provided me with Fig. 5.2 (and the information accompanying it) taken during a visit to
Blackpool Zoo with my grandson Elliot. This book represents the culmination of a lifelong
interest in elephants into which I have dragged my wife, daughter and other family mem-
bers kicking and screaming. I hope that when they see this book, they will think it was a
life well spent and, at the very least, Elliot will enjoy looking at his grandpa’s pictures.
 Preface

In his enlightening book, The Naked Ape, the zoologist Dr Desmond Morris made a
zoological study of the behaviour of Homo sapiens, arguing that such an approach was sci-
entifically justified because humans are simply another species of animal, even though
many live in largely human-made environments (Morris, 1967). The biology of elephants
has been extensively studied in the wild, but elephants have another biology: their biology
when under human care. Captive elephants are deserving of scientific study because they
can tell us things about elephants that would be difficult to investigate in the wild, and
also because they have a distribution, ecology, population biology, social structure, reper-
toire of behaviour and other characteristics that are different from their wild conspecifics.
This book is about the biology of elephants under human care, their welfare and their
unique relationship with humans. It is my attempt to draw together the many studies con-
ducted on elephants living in zoos, circuses, logging camps and other captive situations,
many (if not most) of which are ignored by the existing books on elephants. These animals
have a story to tell that, although it may not be as exciting as those of elephants living
wild in Africa and Asia, nevertheless deserves to be told.
If we were to ask, ‘What do we know about the biology of takins in captivity?’ the
answer would be, ‘Not very much’. The same cannot be said of elephants. Elephants have
been kept in captivity for thousands of years. In 350 BCE Aristotle described the training
of elephants in his History of Animals. By the 1970s field biologists were beginning to
describe the ecology and behaviour of wild elephants in Africa and Asia in detail.
Alongside these studies of elephants in their natural habitats, other scientists have been
studying the biology of elephants living in captivity.
Some of the early captive studies were concerned with basic biology (including post-
mortem anatomical studies), but in recent years there has been considerable interest in the
ecology, behaviour and welfare of elephants living in zoos and other captive environ-
ments. Their potential role in elephant conservation and the difficulties associated with
providing elephants with good welfare have attracted the interest of scientists, conserva-
tionists, animal welfare campaigners and politicians.
The published research on captive elephant biology is scattered throughout the aca-
demic literature in a wide range of journals and within husbandry manuals, reports
commissioned by governments and the publications of animal welfare organisations. The
purpose of this book is to draw together the results of published research conducted on
the ecology, behaviour and welfare of elephants living in zoos and other captive environ-
ments and, where useful, to compare these studies with what is known about elephant
biology in the wild. While it is not intended to be a husbandry manual, some of the stud-
ies discussed have clear husbandry implications. Although I have referred to some pub-
lished research concerned with the health and veterinary care of elephants, I have not
attempted to replicate the available books on this subject.

xv
xvi Preface

If we are to continue to manage elephants under human care, we have a duty to use all
of the available scientific knowledge to produce evidence-based management systems that
provide elephants with the best possible welfare. The existing elephant husbandry guide-
lines barely scratch the surface of what we know about elephants in captivity, and much
of what has been published is scattered within a myriad of journals and unpublished
reports. I hope this book goes some way towards gathering this information together in a
way that is accessible to scientists and nonscientists alike.

Paul A. Rees
University of Salford, Greater Manchester,
United Kingdom
 Who is this book for?

This book should be useful for students studying zoology, zoo biology, animal behav-
iour, veterinary science, animal welfare and other related disciplines, as well as zoo pro-
fessionals who work with elephants and anyone who has a serious interest in the
Elephantidae. I hope it will also inform the debate about whether the potential conserva-
tion role of captive elephants can justify keeping them in zoos.
Over the past few years there has been a considerable increase in the number of papers
published on captive elephants, especially those living in zoos. I do not expect this interest
to wane any time soon, with the consequence that by the time anyone reads this, science
will have moved on and this work will be somewhat out of date. This, of course, is
inevitable and the fate of all textbooks. Nevertheless, I hope it will act as a starting point
for anyone interested in the subject and save them the chore of starting their research too
far back in time.

xvii
 ‘Zoo elephant’ or ‘elephant living
in a zoo’: a note on terminology

Some journals concerned with animal welfare or animal ethics discourage the use of
terms such as ‘zoo animals’ and ‘wild animals’, preferring authors to refer to ‘animals liv-
ing in zoos’ and ‘free-ranging animals’, respectively. Some authors refer to ‘zoo-housed’
elephants, while others use ‘in situ’ populations to refer to elephants living within their
range states. The style guide for the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science requires
authors to: ‘Use “animal in the laboratory” (zoo or wild) at first mention in both abstract
and text.’ I have tried to use terms such as ‘elephants living in zoos’ and ‘elephants work-
ing in logging camps’ where appropriate. However, I have also used terms such as ‘zoo
elephants’, ‘circus elephants’, ‘wild elephants’, and ‘captive elephants’ to avoid writing
sentences that are unnecessarily long and clumsy, and to avoid repetition. I have used the
personal pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ rather than ‘it’ when referring to individual elephants
whose sex is known, and the relative pronoun ‘who’ when referring to specific individual
elephants, rather than ‘that’.

xix
 C H A P T E R

1
Elephants and their relationship
with humans

[The elephant] is the most significant terrestrial mammal survival, one that we might have expected
to have disappeared in the Pleistocene.
Clive Spinage (2019)

1.1 Another book about elephants

Elephants are probably the most recognisable animals on Earth. They have a long and
complex association with humans and have been studied for thousands of years.
People and elephants can form extraordinary relationships, sometimes even life-long
relationships. Some mahouts and elephant keepers form bonds with their elephants that
last for many decades. Some people care for elephants in general and devote their lives to
elephant welfare, either in the wild or in captivity. Others devote their lives to the scien-
tific study of elephants or to their conservation. Some people who have no interest in ele-
phants per se have had their lives blighted by herds that raid their crops and destroy their
homes. Others die at the hand of wild or captive elephants, perhaps because they trusted
individual animals too much, or because they came between elephants and their food.
In the developed world, human perceptions of elephants are largely based on encoun-
ters at circuses and zoos, and from information presented in books, on television and in
films. Few people living in the range states of elephants or in developed countries have
had the opportunity to see elephants living in the wild.
Zoo and circus elephants are generally slow-moving and subservient individuals. Often
visitors see keepers working closely with them. On television we see Asian elephants
working with mahouts, again in a subservient relationship. In the developed world,
human perceptions of elephants are generally of animals that are endangered by human
activity and no real threat to humans.
In Tarzan, The Jungle Book, Dumbo, Daktari and other films, TV programmes and car-
toons, elephants are usually portrayed sympathetically, as a friend and companion of

Elephants Under Human Care

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-816208-8.00001-4 1 © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
2 1. Elephants and their relationship with humans

humans. But where they live alongside people who do not have the luxury of caring a
great deal about wildlife conservation, elephants are often perceived as competitors for
food and a threat to human life and property.
Why do we need another book about elephants? Many books have been written about
elephants, but most have paid little attention to the biology of elephants under human
care. Major scientific texts on wild elephants first appeared in the 1970s and were con-
cerned with the behaviour and ecology of particular populations, such as those in
southeastern Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) (McKay, 1973), North Bunyoro, Uganda (Laws et al.,
1975), Lake Manyara in Tanzania (Douglas-Hamilton and Douglas-Hamilton, 1975) and
southern India (Sukumar, 1989). The Natural History of the African Elephant (Sykes, 1971)
drew together much of what was known about the species at the time, but again focussed
on wild elephants, particularly their diseases (including anatomy) and ecology.
In his book Elephants, Eltringham (1982) devoted just four pages to ‘Elephants in Zoos’
in a work of 262 pages, and did not mention any of the research conducted on elephants
living in zoos. Most of this section of the book is an account of the life of an elephant
called Jumbo at London Zoo. Sukumar’s The Asian Elephant: Ecology and Management is
based mainly on a study he conducted on wild elephants in southern India (Sukumar,
1989). It does not concern itself with captive elephants and devotes just half a page of its
255 pages to captive breeding within range states.
Spinage’s book Elephants (Spinage, 1994) focuses on wild individuals, largely ignoring
studies of captive elephants, except for Benedict’s study of an Asian circus elephant: The
Physiology of the Elephant (Benedict, 1936). In Sukumar’s The Living Elephants: Evolutionary
Ecology, Behavior, and Conservation, the section devoted to the ‘Management of elephants in
captivity’ consists of just five pages out of a total of 478 and largely ignores the stud-
ies of elephants conducted in zoos (Sukumar, 2003). More recently, the behaviour and
ecology of African elephants have been described in detail by Moss et al. (2011), but this
book is based on the lives of wild elephants living in Amboseli in Kenya and the work of
the Amboseli Elephant Research Project that began in 1972.
Early books on captive Asian elephants predate works on wild elephants and began to
appear at the end of the 19th century. An early source of information on Asian elephants
was published in Madras by Steel (1885), A Manual of the Diseases of the Elephant and His
Management and Uses. In 1910 Lt. Colonel G.H. Evans, Superintendent of the Civil Veterinary
Department in Burma (Myanmar), published a similar book on elephant diseases (Evans,
1910). This was followed by a work entitled The Care and Management of Elephants (Ferrier,
1947). Lt. Colonel J.H. Williams’s book Elephant Bill was published in 1951 and described his
exploits as a soldier and elephant expert in Burma working for the Bombay Burma Trading
Corporation extracting teak from the forests, and during the Burma Campaign of the Second
World War (Williams, 1951). Although he was not a scientist, the work contains much useful
anecdotal information about the lives, behaviour and health of working elephants at the time.
Captive elephants suffer from a range of foot problems, some of which may ultimately
be fatal. Csuti et al. (2001) published The Elephant’s Foot: Prevention and Care of Foot
Conditions in Captive Asian and African Elephants following the first North American confer-
ence on elephant foot care and pathology that was held in 1998 at Oregon Zoo.
Kurt and Garaı̈ (2007) have drawn together captive studies in The Asian Elephant in
Captivity, largely focussing on working animals kept within the range states and at the

Elephants Under Human Care

 1.2 What is an elephant? 3
Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage in Sri Lanka. This book predates a great many of the recent
studies conducted on elephants in zoos, and there is no equivalent for the African species
for the obvious reason that so few individuals have been kept in captivity in Africa.
The major work by Fowler and Mikota (2006) entitled Biology, Medicine, and Surgery of
Elephants focuses largely on veterinary science. The chapter on ‘Behavior and Social Life’
extends to just nine of the 565 pages. In 2008, Wemmer and Christen published Elephants
and Ethics: Towards a Morality of Coexistence. Although the title promised an ethical that
is to say, a philosophical consideration of the issues surrounding the relationship
between people and elephants, unfortunately few of the authors are ethicists and conse-
quently the quality of the chapters varies and many of the articles are narrative in nature
rather than academic (Wemmer and Christen, 2008).
This book is concerned with elephants in human care living in zoos, circuses, and
logging and tourist camps and focuses primarily on the work published in peer-
reviewed journals concerned with their behaviour, ecology and welfare. Most of the aca-
demic, conservation and popular interest in elephants is in wild elephants, not elephants
living in captivity. Nevertheless, elephants living under human care are legitimate subjects
of study for a number of reasons. They are interesting subjects in their own right as are
other species kept in zoos because their biology in captivity is different from the biology
of their wild conspecifics; they may help us to understand wild elephants; they may be of
conservation value; and they have particular welfare needs that can only be adequately
addressed if we find out more about them.
Mankind’s relationship with elephants is longstanding and complex. It does not depend
on how we classify elephants from a zoological point of view, but before examining the
biology of elephants living under human care, and the different types of relationships that
people have with them, we should first consider the different ‘types’ of elephants and the
people who have discovered and described them.

1.2 What is an elephant?

For most people an elephant is an elephant. The majority of the general public probably
cannot tell Asian elephants from African elephants, and would consider the distinction
between savannah and forest elephants of academic interest only. In many old films set in
Africa, Asian elephants were used instead of the African species because they were more
readily available, and it was no doubt assumed that the film-going public would be oblivi-
ous to the error. In the 1960s television series about a vet running a fictional animal behav-
iour study centre in East Africa, Daktari, an Asian elephant called Modoc wore false ears to
make her look African (Carwardine, 1995).

1.2.1 Elephant taxonomy

Most of what we know about the origin and evolution of elephants is because of
one American scientist: Henry Fairfield Osborn. After a lifetime of research devoted to
elephant fossils at the American Museum of Natural History, Osborn published a

Elephants Under Human Care

Another random document with
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 A Paramount Picture. The Ace of Cads.
“THE ACE OF CADS” TRIES TO FORGET HIS LOST ELEANOR AT
THE GAMING TABLE

She: “Oh, but I can match you one vulgar Restoration gallant against
another!
“ ‘Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts and broken vows;
If I by miracle can be
This live-long minute true to thee,
’Tis all that Heaven allows.’ ”

He sighed: “How I loved you, Leonora! As I had never loved anyone

before, as I will never love anyone again!”
“How I loved you, Maximilian! But now!” And she said: “A legal
separation is a silly quibble. Besides, you might want to marry again. Or I
might.”
“Might, Leonora? But you will, must, can’t help but! With your beauty,
youth, wealth.”
 “Thank you. I have often noticed that one’s friends like one best as one is
leaving them. Then, Maximilian, shall I divorce you?”
“If you please, dear. My lawyers are Messrs. Onward & Christian. They
will arrange the matter with yours in the usual way.”
“Remember, dear, that your King will not receive a divorced Duke at
court.”
“The King can do no wrong,” yawned the Duke. “It must be rather hard
on him sometimes, but the law is the law.”
His eyes were closed against her beauty, else he had seen the sudden
smile that touched her beauty, touched it and was going, going, lurked a
while in the depths of her eyes like a very small bird in the ferns of love-in-
the-mist, and lo! was gone. She said softly: “You are such a baby, Max!”
Seamen passed by, bearing a great leather Innovation trunk to the side. A
black cloud rose up from Africa and hid the sun. A shadow walked across
the pretty town of Cannes and drove the youth from painted faces.
“And because,” said the young Duchess wistfully, “you are such a baby, I
don’t put it beyond you to make love to my sister if you should meet her.
She has always been jealous of me, so she would enjoy nothing so much as
your making love to her. Promise not to, Max, please, oh, please! She has
just come over to Paris, so I read this morning in The New York Herald.
Max, promise not to make a fool of me to my own sister!”
“She’s pretty?”
“Pretty? Are words so scarce, sir, that you must use a copper coin? And
she my twin!”
“Ah me! Oh dear!”
Her voice scarce disturbed the silence of the yacht: “Good-bye, Duke
Maximilian. Our lives go different ways. I do wish you success, happiness,
health. Good-bye.”
As he lay, with closed eyes, his fingers found her hand and raised it to his
lips.
“Good-bye,” said he. Such was his farewell.
She looked back from the side. He lay silent. She said:
“Courtesy, Maximilian?”
A sea-bird mocked the silence. The cloud athwart the sun was now as
large as half the world. The Duchess of Mall said:
 “Chivalry, Maximilian?”
The sea-bird screamed and flew away, and Leonora of Mall cried: “I will
forgive you all things but your farewell, Maximilian. The very birds are
appalled to see chivalry so low in a man that he will take his lady’s adieu
lying down.”
Her maid, hatted and veiled for travelling, whispered to her ear:
“Your Grace, he is asleep.”

III

It is a sorry business to enquire into what men think, when we are every
day only too uncomfortably confronted with what they do. Moreover, the
science of psychology—for that is what we are talking about—is as yet but a
demoiselle among the sciences; and that writer carries the least conviction
who tries to wind his tale about her immature coils. Therefore we will not
enquire into the young Duke’s thoughts, but merely relate his actions: we
will leave his psychology to the fishes of the tideless sea, while we let him
confront us with all his vanity.
The time came when the young Duke awoke. Now the winds of the sea
were playing about him, the sun was certainly not where he had left it, and
the angle of his deck-chair was peculiar. The world was very dark. He
looked upon the sea and found it odd, and he looked upon the land and did
not find it at all.
“Ho!” cried the Duke. “Where is the land, the land of France? Ho there,
Captain Tupper! What have you done with the fair land of France? I do not
see it anywhere. Our French allies will be exceedingly annoyed when they
hear we have mislaid them. And do my eyes deceive me, or is that a wave
making for us over there?”
“It is blowing moderate from the southeast, your Grace.”
“Moderate, upon my word! Captain Tupper, moderation sickens me. Ho, I
see some land over there!”
“We have just left Nice behind, your Grace.”
“I sincerely hope, Captain Tupper, that you are not among those who
affect to despise Nice. Queen Victoria was very fond of Nice. It may not be
Deauville or Coney Island, Captain Tupper, but Nice can still offer
attractions of a homely sort.”
 “But I understood, your Grace, that——”
“These are strange words, Captain Tupper! But proceed.”
“—that our direction was Naples.”
“Naples? Good God, Naples! And look, there’s another wave making
straight for us! Hang on, Tupper. I’ll see you are all right. You sailors aren’t
what you were in the days when you each had a port in every——”
“A wife in every port is the correct form of the libel, your Grace.”
“But hang it, I call this, don’t you, a damned rough sea? However, I feel
very gay this evening. I have just had an idea. Now, Tupper, let me hear no
more of this high-handed talk about turning your back on Nice.”
“But, your Grace, we are making for Naples!”
“Your obsession for Naples seems to me singularly out of place on a
windy evening. I think you might consider me a little, even though I am on
my own yacht. I detest, I deplore, Naples. Put back to Nice, Captain Tupper.
I am for Paris!”
“For Paris, your Grace!”
“For Paris, Captain Tupper, with a laugh and a lance and a tara-tara-
diddle for to break a pretty heart!”

IV

Students of sociology have of recent years made great strides in their

alleviation of the conditions prevailing among the poor; but is it not a fact
that, as a notorious daily paper lately asked, the study of those conditions
appears to attract the interest of only the lighter sort of society people and
the pens of only the most ambitious novelists? And that the benefits of this
study, at least to novelists, are not mean, was proved beyond all doubt only
the other day, when perhaps the wealthiest of contemporary writers
increased his fortune by writing a tale about a miser in a slum. No one, on
the other hand, will deny that the achievements of sociologists among the
poor are as nothing compared with those of students of hospitality who, poor
and unrewarded though they remain, have of late years done yeoman work
in alleviating the conditions prevailing among the rich. It is to the generous
spadework of men such as these that American hostesses in Europe owe the
betterment of their lot; and it is by the support of their merciful hands that
ladies burdened with great wealth are prevented from sinking down in the
rarefied atmosphere to which they have been called.
Mere students of hospitality had not, however, been strong enough to
support the ailing burden of Mrs. Omroy Pont when that lady had first come
over from America at the call of certain voices that had advised her that her
mission lay in European society. It had needed graduates of that
brotherhood, lean with endeavour in ball-rooms and browned with the suns
of the Riviera, to prevent that ample lady from succumbing to the exhaustion
of carrying her wealth through the halls of her houses in London and Paris
among guests who had failed to catch her name on being introduced. But the
Good Samaritans had worked unceasingly on her behalf, and since Mrs.
Omroy Pont had both great wealth and infinite insensibility she was soon in
a position to give a ball at which quite half the guests knew her by sight.
The morning after the Duke’s arrival in Paris there was this notice in the
Continental Daily Mail: “The Duke of Mall has arrived at his residence in
the Avenue du Bois, and will spend the spring in Paris.” And presently the
good Mrs. Omroy Pont was on the telephone, first here, then there and
finally to the Duke himself, saying: “My dear Duke, how do you do, how do
you do? I am so glad you are in Paris just now, Paris is so attractive in the
spring. You mustn’t fail to see the tulips in the Tuileries, they are as beautiful
as débutantes. My dear Duke, I am giving a party to-morrow night, you must
come, you really must come, now don’t say you won’t because I can’t bear
that, and really I must say, my dear Duke, that your unfortunate inability to
accept any of my invitations so far has seemed almost marked, whereas
——”
“I am afraid,” began the Duke, who had not the faintest intention of going
anywhere near one of Mrs. Omroy Pont’s parties, for she bored him and life
is short.
“But you mustn’t be afraid!” cried Mrs. Omroy Pont. “Now, my dear
Duke, I want you particularly to come to this party because there is someone
who wants to meet you, someone very lovely, positively I am not pulling
your leg——”
“Really this is too much!” the Duke muttered, coldly saying out aloud:
“Dear Mrs. Omroy Pont, you do me great honour but I am afraid that an
extremely previous and decidedly prior engagement——”
 “It is Miss Ava Lamb who wants to meet you, my dear Duke. She has just
come over to Paris. Dinner is at nine. Thank you, thank you. It will be such
fun. You will not have to talk unless you want to and you may go to sleep
just when you like as I have engaged Mr. Cherry-Marvel to conduct the
conversation over dinner. At nine then, my dear Duke.”

The Duke, as he fairly acknowledged to himself the morning after Mrs.

Omroy Pont’s party, had been diverted beyond all expectation by his meeting
with Miss Lamb. While she, candour compelled him to admit, hadn’t seemed
any less sensible to the pleasant quality of their companionship. A beautiful
girl, a sensible girl, with a lively interest in the passing moment and a
delicious capacity for deriving pleasure from the twists in conversation
which came so naturally to the Duke but were become, it has to be
confessed, a shade familiar to his friends. She hadn’t, he reflected over his
morning coffee, said anything throughout the evening that didn’t interest and
entertain; and, since she had come to Europe for the first time but the other
day, had amused him vastly with her impressions, which weren’t by any
means all favourable, since Miss Lamb confessed to a taste for simplicity;
which was very agreeable to the Duke, who was also wealthy.
All this made very pleasant thinking for the Duke over his morning
coffee; but had he consulted his memory more carefully, it might have
emerged that Miss Lamb had listened with pretty attention the while he had
talked, the matter of his talk seldom being so abstract in nature that she
couldn’t entirely grasp it by just looking at him.
What, of course, had instantly impressed him, as it impressed all who
knew the Duchess, was the amazing resemblance between the sisters; since
the fact that twins are very frequently as alike as two peas never does seem
to prepare people for the likeness between the twins they actually meet. Now
between Miss Lamb and the Duchess of Mall there wasn’t, you dared swear,
so much as a shadow of difference in grace of line and symmetry of feature.
But why, as Ava Lamb sensibly protested, why on earth should there be or
need there be or could there be, since Leonora and she had been twins as
punctually to the second as was possible?
A nearer view, however, discovered a deal of difference between the
sisters: in those small gestures of voice, habits of expression, capacity for
attention and the like, which, so the Duke had warmly said, contribute far
more than actual looks to mark the difference between one woman and
another. Nor were they less dissimilar in colouring, for whereas both the
Duchess and Miss Lamb had those small white faces and immense blue eyes
generally affected by American ladies for the conquest of Europe, the
Duchess’s hair was of a rich and various auburn shaded here to the deep
lights of Renaissance bronze and there to the glow of Byzantine amber—the
Duchess’s hair was, in fact, fair to fairish, while Miss Lamb’s was as near
black as is proper in anyone with blue eyes who is without Irish blood.
In the course of the ball that inevitably followed Mrs. Omroy Font’s
dinner-party the Duke had had further opportunity of judging the differences
between his wife and her beautiful sister. And presently he had thought it
only fair to tell Miss Lamb that he and her sister had decided, for each their
sakes, to break their marriage; and he had thought it only fair to himself to
point his confession with a sigh, a sigh which he explained, after a silence
quite beautifully bridged by an understanding look from her, as being forced
from him by the fact that there was no pleasing some women.
“You mustn’t for a moment think,” he’d added wretchedly, “that I am
trying to enlist your sympathy against your own sister, but——”
“Please!” Miss Lamb had protested quite unhappily to that. And here was
another and the sweetest difference of all between the sisters, for Miss
Lamb’s was the prettiest American accent imaginable, whereas the Duchess
had long since and all too completely achieved the cold and ironic monotony
of the mother-tongue.
To be with Ava Lamb, the Duke had gratefully reflected at that moment,
was to look on all the beauty of his wife in atmospheric conditions
undisturbed by his wife’s sarcastic habit of mind. Miss Lamb hadn’t a touch
of that irony and sophistication which is so often mistaken by American
ladies for European culture, she was perfectly that rarest of all visitors to a
bored continent, a fresh and simple American lady.
And “Please!” was all she had said about her sister! But to the young
Duke that one word had meant so much, forced as it had been so unhappily
from her lips, as if half to shield her pert sister against the consequences of
her folly, half to prevent him from seeing how deeply she disapproved of
that sister, and wholly and sweetly to stay his tongue from exploring further
into that misguided sister’s character—it had meant so much that he had
been content to wait on her understanding even before she’d quietly added:
“Oh, I understand——”
“But do you, do you?” he had cried emphatically, and she had let silence
present him anew with her deep sense of understanding. She had a delicious
talent for silence.
“My dear”—it had just slipped out of him like that, quite naturally, quite
wonderfully—“if only other women were like you! To understand, I mean,
just to understand!”
“And men?” Miss Lamb had dropped the two words with perceptible
unwillingness yet with just a touch of defiance, as who should say that she
too, on so rare an occasion, must for once say what was in her mind.
“Men?” the Duke had smiled. He couldn’t somehow think of this tall
gentle girl as a woman of the same age as his wife. She verily quite charmed
him. Once or twice, indeed, he couldn’t help but pity Leonora Mall for the
way she had let life so quickly polish her freshness into that worldliness
which he, for one, found so unsympathetic in women.
“Men, Miss Lamb? And what, if you’ll forgive me, do you know of
men?”
“Enough surely, surely!”
“But that sounds quite threatening! Have you, then, hunted men in
jungles and caught them, caged them and watched them?”
“But, Duke, wouldn’t I, surely, have been married by now if I knew
nothing of men?”
“Oh, well caught! But, Miss Lamb, you haven’t married probably just
because, like all rare people, you’re—well, fastidious!”
“Oh, I don’t know! Maybe. Fastidious is a long word, Duke, and I seem
to have been waiting a long time, so maybe you’re right. But I don’t
know....”
“May I say, then, that you’ve been very wise? So much wiser than many
quite sensible men, so much wiser than many beautiful women. I mean, to
wait.”
“But aren’t we all,” she pleaded, “always waiting?”
“Some of us, unfortunately,” the Duke said grimly, “haven’t. I, Miss
Lamb, didn’t wait long enough.”
 “But are you so sure, Duke?” She was pleading with him. They were
alone. The music and the dance passed behind them. He met her eyes
humbly. “Are you so sure you’ve waited long enough—I mean, my friend,
for time to bring the best out of someone you love?”
“But,” he’d cried wretchedly, “I don’t love her! That’s just, don’t you see,
the awful mistake and pity of it all! It’s not that Leonora and I have
quarrelled, but that we’ve each just found the other out.”
Miss Lamb sighed: “Oh! Oh, dear! And why, why? Way back home I’ve
wondered, you know, about many things. All this sadness in life! It hurts to
hear this. It hurts me—for you both. Poor, poor Leonora!”
The Duke said very earnestly: “Look here, don’t for a moment think that
I’m being cruel or anything like that. Believe me, your sister loves me no
more than she has driven me into loving her. Honest to God, Miss Lamb.”
“You say that! But I know her, Duke. My own sister! Go to her now, and
you will see. I am telling you to go to Leonora now and you will find her
crying for her lost love.”
“She left me cruelly, completely. I had done nothing. She left me, as a
matter of fact, while I was asleep. She took herself from my yacht as though
—look here, as though I was a plague! You call that caring, Miss Lamb? I’d
rather be hated in purgatory than cared for on earth after that fashion. But let
us talk of something else. Of you!”
“Oh, me! Just a tourist in Europe....”
“Of your heart, then, in America! You left it there? Now confess!”
“Dear no! I wouldn’t have my heart jumped by man or god, not I!”
“Bravo, bravo!”
“So my heart’s with me here and now, I thank you.”
“What, you feel it beating!”
“Perhaps. A little.”
“Oh!”
“At being in Paris, Duke.”
“I deserved the snub. Go on, please.”
“My friend,” she said softly, “the history of my life is the history of my
dreams. When I was a girl I had—oh, such dreams!”
“Girls, Miss Lamb dear, do! And when they grow up and marry they use
the sharpest pieces of those broken dreams to beat their husbands with. Oh, I
know! Every husband in the world is held responsible for the accidents that
befall the dreams of his wife’s girlhood! Oh, I know! I’ve been, Miss Lamb
dear, most utterly married.”
“I’m growing afraid of you, Duke. You’ve a cruel tongue!”
“Ava, I wouldn’t have you think I’m abusing your sister to you. But she
certainly was born to be a good man’s wife, and she’s certainly never let me
forget why she has failed to live up to the promise of her birth.”
“But my dreams weren’t at all of knights, cavaliers, heroes! You bet no!
My dreams were just of Paris, this lovely merciless Paris!”
The music and the dance lay in the halls behind them. They were alone
on the formal terrace high above the marvellous sweep of the Champs
Élysées. Far down on the left the fountains of the Place de la Concorde hung
in the blue air like slim curved reeds of crystal. In the courtyard below them
a cypress-tree stood dark and still, and in its shadow the concierge’s wife
talked in whispers to her lover. From the wide pavement men looked up at
the lighted windows with pale astonished faces. Far up on the right, served
by long processions of lights from all the corners of the world, the Arc de
Triomphe stood high against the pale spring night. Most massive of
monuments, built high to the god of war upon the blood of a hundred
battlefields, upon the bones of uncountable men and horses, upon the
anguish of ravished countries—the miraculous art of men to worship their
own misery has raised the monument to the Corsican murderer to be as a
dark proud jewel on the brow of the most beautiful of cities. And Ava cried:
“Look, the stars are framed in the arch! Oh, Duke, look! And so the arch is
like a gate into the kingdom of the stars!”
The Duke whispered: “Don’t talk of the stars, Ava Lamb! The stars make
me think of all that is impossible.”
Up and down the broad avenue between the trees prowled the beasts of
the cosmopolitan night, these with two great yellow eyes, those with one
small red eye closely searching the ground. In the middle distance the Seine
shone like a black sword, and the horrible gilt creatures that adorn the Bridge
of Alexander III were uplifted by the mercy of the night to the dignity of
fallen archangels driving chariots to the conquest of the Heavens. And a
three-cornered moon lifted up an eyelash from the beau quartier about the
Place Victor Hugo.
 “There’s beauty, isn’t there,” sighed Miss Lamb, “in the very name of
Paris! even when it’s said in an American accent——”
“But, sister-in-law, I love your accent!”
“My, how you laugh at me! But ... Paris, Paris! Oh, isn’t that a lovely
name for a town built by men to have!”
And as, over his coffee the next morning, the young Duke reflected on
yesternight, he found himself enchanted by a gay memory. Oh, to be
enchanted again, to be thrilled, to be exalted—and all, honest to God, by
companionship! What fun there was in life when women didn’t grow so
confoundedly familiar with one’s habits. To be with Ava Lamb was to renew
all the joy he’d once had of loving his wife, to renew it and to increase it, for
wasn’t he now older and wiser, wasn’t he now wise enough to appreciate
enchantment? Why, oh, why, wasn’t his wife like this girl, why, since they
were both alike in so much, hadn’t Leonora a little of Ava’s warm attention
and quick understanding? And again the Duke, in solace for self-pity, cast
back to yesternight, how he had warmed to the beautiful stranger’s love of
Paris and had told her the tale of how Paris had come to be called Paris, and
the way of that was this:
“In the old days, Ava, if I may call you Ava, when the world was small
and the animals enormous, they tell how a young conqueror came out of the
dark lands, and with fire and sword he came into the smiling land of France.
Of course it was not called France then, but you know what I mean. Now
that was a great and noble prince, and it was his custom to rest himself after
the tumult of battle with the worship of art and beauty, which is not at all the
fashion among princes nowadays, because of course we have progressed so
far since then. And so our prince, when he had killed as many natives of the
conquered country as the honour of war demands, chained the rest with iron
chains and put them to the building of a mighty city by the river Seine. And
when at last the city was builded it was far and away the fairest city in the
world, as all who saw it instantly admitted under torture, for the young
prince hated argument.
“All went well until they came to the christening of the city, when it
transpired that no one had the faintest idea what name to call it. Here was a
to-do! Nameless they could not leave so great a city, yet what name would
embrace all these marvels of architecture, how could they call so fair a city
by any such commonplace kind of label as Rome, Jerusalem or Wapping?
Therefore the young prince fell weeping with mortification for that his city
must remain nameless just because it was the fairest city in the world, when
an ancient man rose up in the assembly and said: ‘This here is not the fairest
city in the world. But the magic city of Is in the land of Brittany has got it so
beat that this looks like a slum beside it. I have spoken.’ Not that he ever had
a chance to again, even though it presently was proved that not the fairest
city in the world could be fairer than Is in Brittany, and so the prince made
the best of a bad job and called his city the Equal to Is, which is Par-Is,
which is Paris. Shall we dance?”
But she said: “No, no! They are playing an old-fashioned fox-trot.
Besides, one can always dance; there are so many men with whom one can
only dance, for what have they to talk about? Duke, I did love your legend of
the christening of Paris! Did you make it up?”
Now these words had chanced to cast a gloom about the young Duke, and
he had said: “But there is another legend, a more private legend. It tells,
sister, of the house of Mall, how the golden cock on the weather-vane of St.
James’s tower shall crow thrice at the birth of the greatest of the Dukes of
Mall. And, although I say it who shouldn’t, this very miracle attended the
birth of him who now stands beside you. And the legend further tells that
when the golden cock on St. James’s tower again crows thrice the greatest of
the Dukes of Mall shall die. Ava, to-night I find myself in fear of my fate.
That which is written shall come to pass, and no man may defy the passage
of his destiny—but to-night, Ava, I am troubled with a foreboding that the
second crowing of that beastly cock is not far distant from this dear
moment.”
Very sweetly she had tried to soothe his foreboding, but it was heavy in
him and he had not listened, saying: “I’ve never but once before been vexed
with this depression, and that was on the night of the day I fell in love with
Leonora Lamb.”
“Let us dance,” she had said shyly, but they had not danced very
enjoyably owing to the number of the students of hospitality who were
generously supporting Mrs. Omroy Pont on so memorable an occasion.
And thus it was on the first night between Miss Ava Lamb and the young
Duke of Mall.

VI
 Now the Duke had turned his yacht from Naples merely to amuse himself
(that is to say, to annoy his wife); but is it not a fact, as The Morning Post
lately asked in reference to our treating with the Soviet Republic, that it is
dangerous to play with fire? So it happened that the Duke had not been gay
of his new enchantment for long before all others palled on him, and he
awoke one morning to recognise that he could not, try as he would, do
without the one enchantment that was called Ava Lamb. Those American
sisters, first the one and then the other, were fated, it appeared, to ravish his
imagination to the exclusion of the whole race of womankind. And he had
all the more leisure in which to contemplate his dilemma insomuch as Miss
Lamb, pleading the importunity of friends, would sometimes not see him for
days at a time.
In the meanwhile the Duchess, in London, was preparing to petition the
Courts to release her from her unfortunate marriage; and after the usual
correspondence had passed between the lawyers of both parties, and the
usual evidence collected, the majesty of the law pronounced the usual decree
and everyone said the usual things.
Impatiently the Duke in Paris awaited the wire which would tell him that
he was no longer the husband of Leonora Mall; and when it came he delayed
only long enough to instruct his valet to telephone his London florists to
send the ex-Duchess a basket of flowers before calling on Miss Ava Lamb at
her hotel.
However, she was not at home. The Duke protested. Even so, she was not
at home. The Duke felt rebuked for not having conformed to the decencies
of divorce so far as to wait twenty-four hours; and in all humility he returned
the next day.
However, she was not at home. The Duke pleaded. Even so, she was not
at home; for, her maid said, she was resting before the ardours of the night
journey to Cherbourg, whence she would embark for New York. The Duke
scarce awaited the end of the astounding news. Miss Lamb was lying down.
Calm and cold, she said:
“What does this mean, Duke? How dare you force yourself on me like
this?”
Fair, tall, intent, the Duke further dared her displeasure by raising her
unwilling hand to his lips. Twilight filled the room. Outside, the motors
raced across the Place Vendôme. The Duke said:
 “I have dared everything on this one throw. Ava, I love you.”
Miss Lamb said to her maid, “Go,” and she went.
The Duke smiled unsteadily, saying: “Well? Ava, what have you to say?”
Where she lay on her couch in the dusk, her face was like a pale white
flower. But he could not see her eyes, because they were closed. The dress
she wore was black. The hand that lay outstretched on her black dress was as
soft as a temptation, and he said: “I have a ring for that hand that has not its
peer in the world. I love you. Ava, will you marry me?”
He could not see her eyes, because they were closed. But still the dusk
lacked the courage to steal the red from her mouth, and the Duke saw that
her mouth was parted in a queer sad smile.
“Why do you smile?” he whispered, and he said unsteadily: “I know why.
You do not believe I love you, you do not believe I know how to love, you
think me the shallow, vain braggart that I have shown to you in the guise of
myself until this moment. But I love you, Ava, more than life. I love you,
Ava, with all the youthful love I had for your sister increased a thousandfold
by the knowledge I now have of myself: for it is by loving that men come to
know themselves, and it is by knowing themselves in all humility that men
can love with the depths of their hearts. Ava, I do love you terribly! Won’t
you speak, won’t you say one word, do you disdain my love so utterly as
that? Yet I can’t blame you, for I have spent my life in proving that my love
is despicable. I have been proud, pitiless, impious. I am soiled. But, Ava,
even a fool may come to know the depths of his folly; and I who know so
much of desire, dearly beloved, know that I have never loved until this
moment. Still you won’t speak? Ava, I did not think you so ungenerous
when in my vanity I first fell under your gentle enchantment. Dear, your
silence is destroying all of me but my love. Won’t you give me even so
much as a queen will give a beggar, that, had he been another man in another
world, he might have kissed her hand?”
Now night had extinguished all but the last tapers of twilight, and in the
dark silence the maid whispered to his ear: “Your Grace, she is asleep.”

VII

The Duke told his chauffeur outside Miss Lamb’s hotel that he would not
need him again that evening, he would walk. But he had not walked above a
dozen yards across the Place Vendôme, regardless of his direction, regardless
of the traffic, when the breathless voice of his valet detained him. Stormily
the Duke swung about.
“This telegram,” the valet panted, “came the minute after you had left this
afternoon. I feared, your Grace, it might be important, and took the liberty to
follow you.”
The Duke’s face paled as he read. The telegram was from the hall-porter
of his club in St. James’s Street. The valet, an old servant, was concerned at
his master’s pale looks: but he was even more concerned at the sudden smile
that twisted them.
“I hope I did right, your Grace.”
“Quite right, Martin.” And suddenly the young Duke smiled a happy
smile. “You have brought me this wire at just the right moment. I can’t,
Martin, thank you enough. Meanwhile, old friend, go back and pack.
Everything. We are for Mall to-night. Paris is no place for an Englishman to
die in. For pity’s sake, Martin, don’t look so gaga—but go!”
Miss Lamb’s maid did not attempt to conceal her surprise at the Duke’s
quick reappearance at the door of the suite. But the young man’s face was so
strangely set that she had not the heart to deny him sight of her mistress.
“I’ll be,” she sighed, “dismissed!”
The Duke smiled, and maybe he never was so handsome nor so gay as at
that moment.
The maid said: “My mistress still sleeps. It is when she is happy that she
sleeps.”
“Happy? Does it make a woman happy, then, to see a man destroyed by
love?”
“It is more comfortable, your Grace, to be loved than to love. But I know
nothing of my mistress’s heart. I came to her service only the other day. Yes,
she is asleep. And the room is dark.”
The Duke said: “Good! This is indeed my lucky day.”
“I leave you, your Grace. And if I am dismissed?”
“I count you as my friend. I do not forget my friends. Leave me now.”
But a few minutes before he had left that room in a storm of rage. Now, a
great peace was on him. He let the minutes pass by, standing there in the soft
darkness, a man condemned to death. His life behind him lay like a soiled
wilderness through which smirked and pirouetted an unclean travesty of
himself. The gates of death looked to him clean and beautiful. He did not
wish his life had been otherwise: he regretted not a minute of waste, not one
inconstancy, not one folly: he regretted not a strand that had gone to the
making of the mad silly tapestry of his life, he was glad that all had been as
it had been so that he could now be as he was, a man who understood
himself and could die with a heart cleansed of folly and sacred to love.
To the windows of the quiet dark room rose the chatter of the lounging
traffic of the Place Vendôme. The Duke listened, and smiled. Brown eyes
and scarlet lips, blue eyes and scarlet lips, black hair and golden hair and
tawny hair, lazy smile and merry smile and greedy smile and bored smile,
little breathless laughs, little meaningless laughs and sharp cries of pleasure,
dresses of Chanel, Patou, Vionnet, Molyneux—round and round the Place
Vendôme they went, like automata on a bejewelled merry-go-round. And the
Duke saw himself sitting in motor-cars first beside one and then beside
another, talking, talking, whispering, sighing, yawning....
As the minutes passed his sight began to distinguish the objects in the
room. On a table some roses were fainting in a bowl. He made obeisance and
kissed a rose, for kissing a rose will clean a man’s lips. Then he knelt beside
the still figure on the couch and he kissed her mouth.
“Oh!” she cried, and she cried: “You thief!”
He said: “Your voice is so cold that ice would seem like fire beside it. But
I don’t care.” And again he kissed her mouth. Then he said: “Your lips are
burning. That is very odd. Your voice is very cold, but your lips are burning.
Now why is that?”
“For shame,” she whispered. “They are burning for shame that you are so
little of a man.”
He laughed, his lips by her ear. “Beloved, do you think I would die
without kissing your lips? Honestly, beloved, could you expect it?”
In the darkness he could just see the pale mask of her face and the
shining, savage pools of her eyes, and he kissed first one and then the other.
She was very still.
“Die?” she whispered.
He would have laughed again, but he fancied that maybe too much
laughter would not become his situation, would appear like bravado. But he
would have liked to show her he was happy, and why he was happy. A vain
man, he had realised that he was contemptible: therefore it was good to die.
Loving as he had never loved before, he was unloved: therefore it was good
to die.
He told her how he had been warned that the cock on St. James’s tower
had crowed thrice that dawn. And then he was amazed, for as he made to
rise he could not. He cried out his wonder.
She said: “Be still!”
He cried out his despair.
She whispered: “Be still!”
Her arm was tight about his shoulder, and that was why his happiness had
left him like a startled bird. He sobbed: “Child, for pity’s sake! It’s too late
now. Let me die in peace. To have died without your love was blessedly
easy. A moment ago I was happy.”
“Die! You!” And, as she mocked him thus, the cold irony of the English
tongue tore aside the veil of the American accent, and when the Duke stared
into her eyes he had leapt up and run away for shame but that her arm was
still tight about his shoulder.
“You, Leonora, you! And so you have revenged yourself!”
She whispered: “Be still!”
And as he made to tear himself away, she said: “Yes, I wanted to be
revenged. I wanted you to fall in love with me. I wanted you to look a fool.”
“Then you must be very content, Leonora! Let me go now.”
“Let you go?” she cried. “Let you go! But are you mad!”
“Oh, God,” he said pitifully, “what is this new mockery!”
“You see,” she sighed, “I’ve gone and fallen in love with you again! That
rather takes the edge off my joke, doesn’t it? Oh, dear! Maximilian, I have
waited to love you as I love you now ever since I married you four years
ago. But you never would let me. Be honest, sweet—would you ever let me
love you? You were always the world’s spoilt darling, the brilliant and
dashing and wealthy Duke of Mall—and I your American wife! Darling,
what a lot of trouble you give those who love you! I have had to go through
all the bother of divorcing you to make you love me, and now I suppose I
must go through all the bother of marrying you again because you’ve made
me love you——”
“Oh, but listen!” he made to protest.
 “I certainly won’t!” she cried. “I must say, though, that you’ve made love
to me divinely these last few months, and the real Ava would have fallen for
you, I’m sure, if she hadn’t been in California all this while. I dyed my hair a
little, but the only real difference between me and your wife was that I
listened to you while you talked about yourself. Darling,” said she, “kiss me,
else how shall I know that we are engaged to be married?”
He said desperately: “Leonora, what are you saying! Do you forget that I
am to die?”
“Not you, not you! You may be divorced for the time being, poor
Maximilian, but you’re not nearly dead yet. I sent that wire myself this
morning from Victoria Station—to mark the fact that the Duke of Mall is
dead! Long live the Duke of Mall!”
“Leonora, I can’t bear this happiness!”
“But you must learn to put up with it, sweet!”
“Leonora, how divine it is to be in love! I love you, Leonora!”
“My, how this British guy mocks a poor American girl!”
“But, Leonora, I adore you!”
“Words, words, words! Whereas, sweet, a little action would not come
amiss. You might for instance, kiss me. Max, how I’ve longed to be kissed
by you these last few months! Max darling, please kiss me at once! I assure
you it is quite usual between engaged couples.”
Note: The legend of the Dukedom of Mall may not find a full measure of
credence owing to the fact (only recently pointed out to the author) that the
weather-vane on the tower of St. James’s Palace is adorned, not by a golden
cock, but by a golden arrow. But have we not been warned in letters of gold,
that shall last so long as mankind lasts, not to put our faith in the word of
Princes? The author does in all humility venture to suggest that the same
must undoubtedly apply also to the word of Dukes.
 VII: THE REVOLTING DOOM OF A GENTLEMAN WHO WOULD
NOT DANCE WITH HIS WIFE

T HERE is a tale that is told in London, and maybe it is told also in the
salons of New York and upon the Boulevards of Paris, how one night a
nightingale sang in Berkeley Square and how that song was of a doubtful
character calculated to provoke disorder in households brought up in the fear
of God. Needless to say, there are not wanting those who will have it that no
nightingale could have done such a thing; nor has the meanness of envy ever
been so clearly shown as by those who have suborned certain bird-fanciers
into declaring that the nightingale is a bird notably averse from singing in
squares and that the legend should therefore be deleted from the folk-tales of
Mayfair. But, however that may be, the song of the nightingale is far from
being the burden of this tale, which has to do in a general way with a plague
of owls, in a particular way with one owl, and in a most particular way with
the revolting doom of a gentleman who would not dance with his wife.
Many will hold, in extenuation of his disagreeable attitude, that he could not
dance. But could he not have taken a lesson or two?
Now of the many and divers people who saw the owls in flight we need
mention only policemen, statesmen, ’bus-drivers, noblemen, Colonials and
hawkers, to be convinced of the truth of what they one and all say, how in
the gloom of a certain summer’s twilight not long ago there flew a plague of
owls across Trafalgar Square towards the polite heights of Hampstead Heath.
Maybe no one would have remarked them, for the strange cries and hootings
with which they adorned their flight were not discordant with the noises of
the town, had not the pigeons that play about Lord Nelson’s monument fled
before them with affrighted coos; and in such an extremity of terror were the
timid creatures that very few were ever seen in those parts again, which is a
sad thing to relate.
Nor can any man speak with any certainty as to the exact number of the
owls, for the twilight was deep and the phenomenon sudden; but one and all
need no encouragement to vouch for their prodigious multitude: while the
fact that they appeared to be flying from the direction of Whitehall at the
impulse of a peculiar indignation has given rise among the lower people to a
superstition of the sort that is perhaps pardonable in those who have not had
the benefits of a public-school education. These simples declare that the
owls, for long peacefully asleep within the gloomy recesses unrecognisable
to the feathered intelligence as the austere House of Lords, had been startled
from their rest by the activities of the new Labour Government as revealed
in that patrician place by the agile incendiarism of my Lords Haldane and
Parmoor, and had in one body fled forth to seek a land wherein a
Conservative Government would afford them the lulling qualities necessary
for their rest.
The serious historian, however, is concerned only with facts. The plague
of owls fled no one knows whither, although superstition points to Italy. But
this much is known, that whilst crossing the brilliant centre of Piccadilly
Circus one among them swooped down from the twilight and perched on the
left wing of the figure of Eros:[A] which, presented to the nation by one of
the Earls of Shaftesbury, adorns the head of the charming fountain where old
women will sell pretty flowers to anyone who will buy, roses in summer and
roses in winter, roses by day and roses by night, or maybe a bunch of violets
for a young lady, a gardenia for a gentleman of the mode.
[A] Almost immediately after the publication of this tale in a magazine, the figure of
Eros was removed from Piccadilly Circus. It has been generally supposed that, to effect
this removal, pressure was brought to bear on the London County Council by
gentlemen-who-will-not-dance-with-their-wives, whose name, alas, is legion.
Now why that one owl separated itself from its fellows for no other
apparent reason than to perch on the left wing of Lord Shaftesbury’s Eros
has hitherto been a mystery to the man in the street, who was at the time
present in considerable numbers reading The Evening News and discussing
the probable circulation the next morning of The Daily Mail. The owl rested
on its perch most silently: nor did it once give the least sign of any
perturbation at the din of the marching hosts of Piccadilly Circus, and this
for the space of one hour and eighteen minutes: when it hooted thrice with
marvellous dolour and fled, to be lost almost on the instant among the lofty
shadows of the Regent’s Palace Hotel.
It has to be told that the cry of the owl on the fountain served three
purposes, which the historian can best arrange in ascending degrees of
abomination with the help of the letters a, b and c: (a) it struck such terror
into the vitals of an inoffensive young gentleman of the name of Dunn that
he has never been the same man since; (b) it was the death-knell of a gentle